Any crumbs from the top table?

I said in Monday's post that Derby were showing some balls to get their wallets out and back a push for promotion to the Premiership this season; that gamble now seems even cannier in the light of David Bond's revelations this week regarding the upcoming hike in prize money for the top division.

Clubs like Colchester could be frozen out

Just think, the club finishing bottom of the Premiership next season will receive Â£30million *and* go on to receive inflated parachute payments when they drop into the Championship. Suddenly being a so-called "yo-yo" club can be a profitable means of existence in the football world, as Bondy suggested in his blog yesterday.

To take the scenario a little further, the yo-yo clubs who find the best managers will develop a squad and style to survive in the top division, with some of the old(er) order perhaps falling down to the Championship.

It's possible the Championship will end up mirroring the Premiership, as David Sheepshanks suggested in this morning's Daily Telegraph, with a promotion battle, removed from the rabble below, being fought out year after year. A separate battle, like in the Premiership, created by the uneven distribution of wealth.

You could argue that a swathe of clubs below the very top sides in the country from, say, mid-Premiership to mid-Championship might be sucked on to a vaguely level playing field. If and when our club football gets restructured this is where the dividing lines will no doubt fall.Â

Amid all of this, it's sad to think that, despite the prospect of some serious money being shared around at the top end of the Championship, the flipside is that clubs like Colchester are likely to be squeezed out of the promotion frame when all this kicks in.

Right now we have the real possibility of them climbing up via the play-offs, but once the regular yo-yo clubs begin packing the upper half of the table such romantic stories (like those of Barnsley, Swindon, Watford) will be no more.

On the other hand, if the standards at the top of the Championship are raised maybe their TV rights will rocket, too. Who knows? Not me. Maybe Bondy does.

What I do know is that the (previously discussed) urgent need to climb into the Premiership, which ultimately accounts for the Championship's high rate of manager turnover, will only get worse. There'll be so many jobs flying around soon even Glenn Hoddle might get lucky.

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We all dream of landing a jackpot like the boys in the Premiership, but you have to start small. And what better way to start small than with the Jackson 5.